<p>In a way, you can see the passkeys community pushing *against* this trend, trying to acknowledge this need, developing resources like <a href="https://webauthn.io" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">webauthn.io</span><span class="invisible"></span></a> to allow users and developers to cultivate a structured understanding of the technology as a whole, decoupled from vendor-specific solutions. But the ingrained product development habits from every vendor undermine this.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://tech.lgbt/@nami" class="u-url mention">@<span>nami</span></a></span> спасибо! Просто интересно стало :-)</p>

<p>I can&#39;t blame companies; users really do reflexively avoid learning, and have been conditioned to see their primary feedback mechanism as switching apps. If your app requires learning, you&#39;ll see massive churn and be harshly punished for that. I definitely can&#39;t blame users, who avoid learning because developing deep expertise with modern apps is rewarded by having your brains scrambled with constant A/B tests of everything being reshuffled to suit the users who *don&#39;t* put in effort.</p>

<p>People need to develop sophisticated strategies and think deeply about their values and goals when using social media, but the only response that social media companies have to this is to introduce features or to constantly tweak their recommendation algorithms. Disinformation? Oh, that&#39;s okay, we&#39;ll block the word &quot;suicide&quot; so now everyone starts saying &quot;unalive yourself in minecraft&quot;, great, teen mental health is solved. No need to have a difficult conversation about norms and pedagogy.</p>

<p>Almost every communication technology is like this. Email is bad so we *still* keep getting new email clients that try to &quot;solve&quot; email (or chat apps; remember when slack was going to &quot;solve&quot; email?). Don&#39;t worry, don&#39;t change your habits, you don&#39;t need to learn anything, just click this button. We made a &quot;promotions&quot; tab, and an &quot;important&quot; tab for you, so now you won&#39;t be overloaded. Just consume product, don&#39;t learn to be a better communicator. Here are some suggested AI replies.</p>

<p>The failure of passkeys to date is a particularly dramatic example of this because it&#39;s extremely high-stakes, visible, and black-or-white (you&#39;re either switching your auth to passkeys or you aren&#39;t, whereas other apps you may use in a casual or incorrect capacity). But the same problem exists in other domains, and it&#39;s almost as bad.</p>

<p>This is a particularly painful and comprehensive example of an industry-wide trend, which is that vendors are expected to deliver things as fully-formed, self-explanatory products. Users, already justifiably wary of the upgrade treadmill, reflexively flinch away from anything that looks like a big learning investment, which means &quot;user education&quot; is treated as a sort of taboo, something that *cannot* be made a prerequisite to using a product, because if you&#39;re explaining, you&#39;ve already lost.</p>

<p>This is a great writeup of the continuing failure of passkeys to meet their potential. It demonstrates the gordian knot:</p><p>1. the ecosystem is confusing due to the plethora of different interacting layers<br />2. therefore, to simplify, every vendor attempts to own as many layers as they can, obscuring other vendors&#39; tools<br />3. therefore, users are confused into thinking that passkeys are platform-specific, because their platform vendor is obscuring alternatives</p><p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/12/passkey-technology-is-elegant-but-its-most-definitely-not-usable-security/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">arstechnica.com/security/2024/</span><span class="invisible">12/passkey-technology-is-elegant-but-its-most-definitely-not-usable-security/</span></a></p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> ah sorry, I added a layer of my own interpretation there. Nevertheless, in point 2 under &quot;Speed development&quot;, it does mention the special case of Thomson gazelles. And what I like is that it provided some sources for its claims. Gemini doesn&#39;t seem to do this as far as I have tried.</p>